Facebook's Teenage-Centric Lifestage App is Dead After Less Than a Year

Towards the end of August 2016, when Facebook copying Snapchat was still
in any way surprising, they launched a teen focused app that shared a
great deal with Snapchat - Lifestage. Largely built around photo
editing, Lifestage was one of the more ambitious attempts by Facebook to
move in on Snapchat's territory, and it taught Facebook one fundamental
lesson - don't rebrand to grow an audience.

The Verge

The reason why Facebook have done so well with Instagram is because it
was already an established name when they picked it up. Almost every
time Google, Facebook, Twitter or whoever else have brought in a new
platform with a new name and only tenuous links to its parent, they've
struggled to bring in enough of a user base to maintain. That's probably
why, just under a year after launching proper, Lifestage is no more.

That's far from the only reason though, the app was fraught with
problems. Most notably, despite it supposedly being limited to users
aged 21 and under, there was no means of actually enforcing that rule,
raising very valid concerns about it being used by predators. Just
generally though, the app seems to have struggled to gain any kind of
consistent popularity. In fact, it hasn't been updated since October of
last year, when it was launched on Android. Clearly this has been on the cards for quite some time.

The idea that Facebook would want to jumpstart a brand new app at this
stage in the game seems ridiculous, the market is oversaturated as it
is, but it's easy to forget that even a year ago, they weren't doing
anywhere near as well against Snapchat as they are now. At that point
the strategy was virtually non-existent, they just homed in on
successful ideas which have helped Snapchat, and tried to put their own
spin on them.

Now, virtually every feature Lifestage had to offer is present on
Instagram, Facebook mobile and Messenger, rendering the app itself
almost entirely pointless. In the official statement about mothballing
the app, a spokesperson clarified that the company had 'learned a lot"
from Lifestage, which is code for "everything we needed from it we have
elsewhere now". Still, somewhere out there, there must be a handful of
teenagers disappointed about the death of their favourite app, but I
imagine it's a very small fan-club.